Coyne: Canadian rail safety getting better, not worse

The NDP continues to look for every way to exploit the disaster at Lac-Mégantic to partisan ends, even as it continues to deny doing so. The party may be issuing public statements denouncing the government for having “recklessly cut public safety,” it may be demanding the Transport committee convene special summer hearings, its leader may have mused, as he toured the town, how the tragedy “reminds us” of Tory budget cuts, but as Tom Mulcair later told the CBC: “I’ve been prudent not to draw the exact link.” Quite.

Meanwhile, however, the media have been plowing ahead. Story after story has appeared highlighting various alleged weaknesses in the regulatory apparatus, again never quite directly stating they were responsible, but alluding vaguely to the “questions” they supposedly “raise.” Hasn’t it been five years since the last federal review of railway safety? Didn’t a 2011 environment commissioner’s report take Transport Canada to task for its alleged failures of oversight? What about those thin-hulled DOT-111 tank cars the Transportation Safety Board wanted replaced?

Regulation can always be improved, and reporting on regulatory failures, real or alleged, is obviously in the public interest. But when these are reported in the immediate aftermath of disaster, there’s a pretty clear implication of causation, and an equally clear responsibility to back it up, if not with actual evidence then at least with a coherent argument. At the very least, there is a responsibility to consider the alternative, that the one had nothing to do with the other. Hand-waving references to federal regulation “coming under fresh scrutiny” in the wake of the disaster are the journalistic equivalent of Mulcair’s “exact link” disclaimer.

Perhaps it will be thought nit-picky to ask how any of these supposed gaps in the regulatory firmament contributed to this specific event, though even a reasoned hypothesis would do. But fine, let’s focus on the broader, vaguer, never-quite-stated thesis: that even if no link can be drawn with this particular accident, there is a general laxity in federal railway regulation, either in the rules themselves or their enforcement, such as to make some sort of serious accident of this kind more likely. In other words, that public safety is in jeopardy. I think that is the most generous, least exacting, interpretation of what critics are saying.

As it happens, this is quite easy to verify. If the rails are indeed unsafe, if the regulatory regime has been fatally weakened, it should show up in the accident statistics: over time, a higher probability of accidents will translate into their actuality. These statistics are easily available from the Transportation Safety Board website. Yet they are never cited — possibly because they show, unambiguously, that rail safety is improving, steadily and markedly.

Accidents of all kinds, the broadest indicator, have declined from an average of nearly 1,300 per year in the decade from 1998 to 2007 to 1,066 per year in the five most recent years. The accident rate has declined over the same interval, from 2.8 per million main-track train-miles to 2.2.

The same pattern is repeated, without exception, when you drill further into the numbers. Fires and explosions have fallen from roughly 30 per year to 20. Derailments, from about 750 to just over 600. The vast majority of these are minor: the more serious derailments, involving 10 cars or more, now number about 22 per year, versus 32 per year in the previous decade.

But hasn’t the type of goods being hauled grown more dangerous, notably the well-documented rise in shipments of oil? Perhaps, but not the rate of accidents involving dangerous goods: these have fallen even more sharply, from 216 per year to just 133. Only a very few of these actually result in a spill: from about six per year earlier, these are now down to fewer than three: last year there were two. That’s two accidents resulting in the release of dangerous goods — of all kinds, never mind oil — in 80 million main-track train-miles, plus however many millions of train-miles on smaller tracks.

Even more infrequent are accidents involving fatalities — though these are becoming rarer still, dropping from 95 per year to 75. The vast majority of these, moreover, are at crossings or in railway yards. The number of deaths caused by derailments is about one per year, and falling. Even fewer — statistically, zero — result from fires or leaks of dangerous goods.

Beyond accident rates, there are also “reportable incidents.” Of interest here: cases of “runaway rolling stock” have fallen from 14 a year to 11; reports of “failure to secure,” of the kind thought to be responsible for Lac-Mégantic, are down as well, from 8.5 per year to 6.4. By the way, if you’ve been reading that there are no rules covering this, I suggest you consult the Canadian Rail Operating Rules, Section 112: Securing Equipment, where they are spelled out in some detail.

By every measure, in other words, railway safety is getting better, not worse. Accidents involving large-scale derailments, or the release of dangerous goods, or fires, or runaway rolling stock, always rare, are getting rarer. But an accident that combines all of these? It is literally a unique event, requiring not only a truly remarkable confluence of natural factors but the intervention, allegedly, of gross negligence.

Yet on the basis of this non-existent threat to public safety, either generally or in the particular, we are urged to make wholesale changes to regulation, including replacing the entire existing fleet of tank cars. Weren’t we all supposed to be in favour of “evidence-based decision-making”?

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